Severance Package (13 page)

She uncapped the perfume and felt something brush up the base of her spine.

Her HK P7.

God, Rox, no …

“Don’t move,” Roxanne said, hands trembling. She backed away from Nichole slowly. She had the pistol pointed at Nichole’s head.

“This is not what you think,” Nichole said. “I’m CIA. Listen to me, Roxanne:
I’m CIA.”

“David wanted to kill us all, and now you’re going to poison us all.”

“Rox, you’re making a huge mistake. Please put the gun down.”

“I’m not stupid! I heard him talking about nerve agents!”

Nichole showed her the perfume bottle. “This is yours, Roxanne. Your Euphoria.”

“I slept over last night! You could have switched it!”

“Honey, you can’t put a chemical nerve agent in a perfume bottle.”

Well, you could, actually. But Nichole needed to calm Roxanne down. Tell her what she wanted to hear. Get her gun back. “Then put the perfume down.”

“This is our way out of here.”

“God, Nichole, don’t make me do this.
Please
don’t make me do this. But I’m not going to let you kill us all. I’m not! I don’t want to die in here!”

Everything positive that Nichole had seen in Roxanne—her initiative, her resilience—was now distorted in a fun house mirror. How could she have thought about recruiting someone who could snap so easily, who’d abandon rational thought in a matter of minutes?

Roxanne was still her friend, but she was all wrong for this line of work.

Now Nichole had to do something regrettable. She had to incapacitate her best friend. It would hurt Rox, and it would kill Nichole to do it, but she needed Rox safe and out of the way for now. She could be stashed in one of the empty offices until this was all over. Maybe then they’d have a chance of repairing this breach of trust.

So Nichole pretended to put the perfume back into the purse, but snapped her arm up and blasted it right in Roxanne’s eyes, then slapped the gun down, wrapped her fingers around it, pulled the gun away, dropped the perfume, and then followed up with a chop to Roxanne’s face, right between her nose and lip—an incredibly painful blow that would bring her to her knees. Nichole would use the opportunity to cut off her air and render her unconscious for at least an hour.

But Nichole had misjudged the chop.

And she had kind of, accidentally, sent fragments of bone into her best friend’s brain.

Nichole sat there for a while, crouched down next to her friend’s dead body, pondering her next move.

Pondering how she was going to piece together the broken
shards of her career as an undercover intelligence operative, which had shattered spectacularly—and quite possibly irreparably—in the past thirty minutes.

That’s when she heard footsteps, way on the other side of the room.

Somebody was walking into the dead wing of Murphy, Knox.

Some
bodies.

A male voice said, “Look, Molly. All we need is a double-A battery, and we’re pretty much saved. No matter what Amy has in mind.”

“You busy?” Nichole asked now.

Molly turned. She had a twisted little smile on her face. She parted her lips, the upper one beaded with perspiration. She’d been having fun in here with poor Jamie. There was a lot of blood on the floor. God knows what kind of torture she’d inflicted on him. Then she saw his hand, and had a pretty good idea.

Nichole should have charged in sooner. That would have been the nice thing to do. But those harrowing minutes she’d spent, crouched down next to Roxanne’s body, listening to Jamie scream and beg—they’d been essential. Nichole Wise wasn’t one to strategize on her feet. She needed a few minutes to get her game on.

And now she was ready for the Russian farm girl.

“Zdrastvuyte,”
Molly said.

Formal Russian for “Hello.”

It
was
her on the tape.

But Nichole didn’t let it shake her. She replied:
“Kak delah?”

How are you?

“Kowaies Kateer,”
Molly said.

Ooh, Arabic now. Little Russian farm girl got herself an edu-mah-cation.

Nichole asked,
“Min fain inta?”

Molly ignored the question, and shot back her own:
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Natürlich,”
Nichole replied.
“Mirabile dictu,
wouldn’t you agree?”

“Quam profundus est imus Oceanus Indicus?”

“La plume de ma tante.”

Jamie didn’t know what Nichole and Molly were talking about, everything sounded like gibberish to him—but he knew one thing. Nichole had no idea what she was facing.

“Nichole,” he gasped.
“Run!”

Then he started to crawl forward, using only his right hand, skin burning on carpet, his eyes scanning the empty office for anything remotely resembling a weapon….

There were many ways to go about this, Nichole thought as they bandied about the languages. She had run through two different scenarios while crouched down next to Roxanne’s body.

Molly Lewis had the slender frame of a Russian gymnast—short and skinny. She was probably well trained in various forms of hand-to-hand combat. Now Nichole saw that Molly had this cute little X-Acto blade with a taped-up handle. She was probably like a surgeon with that thing. She’d certainly done a number on Jamie DeBroux’s hand. It had to go.

Nichole, meanwhile, was built like a WNBA player, or at least a decent guard on a women’s college team. She also had her fully loaded HK P7 shoved in the waistband of her capris.

Option #1: Pull the gun, blow the Russian farm girl into the back of this wall, soak the drywall with her blood.

But then she wouldn’t have the chance to gather some potentially career-saving intelligence. So an instant execution was out.
Sure, she could shoot Molly in the leg, but the woman could go into shock very easily. No intelligence there, either.

Option #2: Sudden blinding force.

Pummel the Russian farm girl until her eyes blacken and her spine nearly snaps in half. Smash her ribs so badly that every breath becomes a session of exquisite agony. Cripple her, but hold her back from the brink. Nichole needed her conscious. Pliable. Only then would Nichole have a chance of keeping her job, dim as that prospect may seem at the moment.

Nichole liked Option #2 the best, but it wasn’t as if Molly gave her a choice.

She was already charging with her baby blade.

On screen, Girlfriend jabbed her blade forward.

McCoy smiled. “Look at that.”

Her opponent, a tall big-boned blonde whom the paperwork had identified as Nichole Wise, slapped the blade aside with her right hand, then followed up by smashing the heel of her palm into Girlfriend’s nose. Girlfriend was visibly stunned. She dropped the blade. Took a few steps back.

“Ah,” Keene said, sipping at a fresh cup of tea. “Will you look at
that.”

“Shut up,” McCoy said.

Nichole was surprised how fast Molly dropped the blade. She thought it would be more of a fight. But so what.

Nichole wrapped her left hand around Molly’s throat and used her right to grab the material of her skirt. She pushed hard, slamming Molly’s head against the doorframe. Nichole pulled her back, then pushed forward even harder, aiming higher up the wall. Molly’s head ricocheted off drywall again.
Then Nichole hurled her across the room, smashing her compact little frame against the opposite wall. Some drywall shattered on impact. Dust exploded from the surface. The floors seemed to jolt beneath her feet.

On the return throw, Nichole put Molly through the window overlooking the office, shattering glass and wrapping Molly’s body in the aluminum slats of the venetian blinds.

The Russian farm girl rolled ten feet through glass and bent aluminum before coming to a dead halt.

Eat it, Molly Kaye Finnerty,
Nichole thought. Her arms were already sore. It had been a while since she’d gone to the gym.

On the floor, Molly didn’t move.

Oh hell.

She didn’t do it again, did she? Accidentally kill someone?

This would
not
be good.

Nichole thought about her cousin Jason, who was four years older, and liked to inflict all manner of playground tortures on any younger cousin he could catch at family gatherings. That is, until the day Nichole—all of eight years old—grabbed Jason’s wrist, twisted his arm behind his twelve-year-old back, locked the elbow, then pushed. She pushed up hard, hard as she was worth, dislocating Jason’s shoulder.

Nichole’s father said, “Sweetie, you’ve gotta learn to control that temper of yours. You’re stronger than you think.”

I hear you, Dad.

But any concern was short-lived. The moment Nichole stepped through the shattered window, glass crunching beneath the soles of her black flats, Molly came to life.

She sprang up, like an unbreakable industrial coil had been fused into her spine.

She stood erect, like nothing was wrong, even though she sported cuts over her arms and face, with some glass still poking out from the flesh. But Molly acted as if the shattered glass,
broken drywall, and bent aluminum didn’t exist. Hands at her sides. Hair still parted in place. Lips still deep red, glistening with moisture.

She smiled at Nichole. Raised her eyebrows, as if to say,
What else you got, big girl?

McCoy let loose a “Hooo-hah!”

Which annoyed Keene. He’d seen,
hated
that Al Pacino movie.

“Big deal. She’s standing up.”

“Uh-uh,” said McCoy. “My baby is Cool Hand Luke.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“You wouldn’t.”

Nichole instantly decided that her dad had been exaggerating that day, that her cousin was nothing more than a little pansy.

Because Nichole thought she’d given that Russian farm girl a serious pounding, and yet there she was. Standing. Grinning. Taunting.

But that didn’t stop her from charging forward, grabbing Molly by her throat and crotch, and starting the punishment all over again.

The floor plan of this unused section of Murphy, Knox was relatively simple. Closed-door offices lined three sides, with a series of supply closets along the fourth. In the middle of the floor were drywall sections that divided the space into cubicles and, toward the middle, a space for two photocopiers and four printers. Five years out of date. Unplugged. Unsupported.

What interested Nichole were the closed office spaces. Each with their own window, reaching from two feet from ground level up to the ceiling. Privacy granted with aluminum venetian blinds mounted on the inside.

Nichole smashed Molly’s body through the closest available window.

The crash was spectacular; the force behind the throw was so great that Molly took glass and aluminum blind with her as she rolled across the carpet and bounced off the opposite wall.

Nichole stepped through the broken window.

“How you feeling today, Molly,” she said. “Everything okay?”

Nichole heard the sound of spitting. Russian farm girl was finally feeling it. Good. She needed answers, and Nichole was already tiring of throwing her through plate glass windows.

“Just relax down there. We’re going to do some talking. Whatever language you prefer. We could even do Farsi.”

Molly planted both hands on the carpet, then pushed down against the floor and snapped up into a perfect standing position. Facing Nichole.

Smiling.

No hesitation this time. Nichole wrapped both hands around Molly’s neck and slammed her back against the wall.

“You want to talk,
puta?”
Molly said, curling her lips into another hideous smile.

Nichole would admit it. She lost her mind for a moment.

She screamed and hurled Molly through the window again. Molly tripped over the bottom frame of the window and rolled across the hall and into a cubicle. Within a second, she had popped up again. But this time Nichole was ready. She hopped through the jagged window frame, planted her feet, pivoted, and leveled a roundhouse kick at Molly’s face that—if Nichole’s training sessions were any indication—would fracture her skull upon impact. Nichole was through screwing around. She needed to
hurt
Molly.

But Nichole’s foot never had the chance to connect.

Because Molly launched up in the air, flipping backwards over the wall of the cubicle like a dolphin at a waterpark.

Nichole’s foot slammed into drywall instead.

McCoy was practically orgasmic. “Oh! Did you see that?
Oh!”

Keene had a difficult time containing his surprise. That
was
an incredibly impressive move. And he had watched a lackluster video feed. Imagine what it must have looked like in real life.

The audio, however, was crystal clear. Murphy had equipped the office with omnidirectional mikes in pretty much every corner. The man clearly wanted to hear if his operatives tried to stifle a fart. So Keene heard the thud of the kick slamming into drywall, and it was like a wrecking ball accidentally dropped on a slab of sidewalk.

“I’m so in love,” McCoy said.

“Want me to pull it out of your pants for you, give it a few tugs?”